AMD Phenom II 42 TWKR Black Edition Processor

The Truth Behind TWKR CPUs

AMD also posted up this rather nifty little overclocking video featuring K|ngp|n, chew*, and Gomeler.

Since the AMD Phenom II X4 TWKR 42 Black Edition processors are
something special, we figured that we’d sit down with the AMD marketing
team from Austin and ask them a few questions.

Why is AMD sending out TWKR processors?

To give the
hardcore enthusiast/overclockers some love. There has been a lot of support and
AMD wanted to give back with parts that have characteristics that are
specifically attractive to OC’rs: can handle more voltage and scale really well
under extreme conditions (LN2 and LHe).

What does the name TWKR stand for?

Nothing
too clever here – tweaker – the affectionate name we’ve given to those talented
few that really know the in’s and out’s of extreme overclocking

So a site that said this is incorrect: “AMD has said that TWK stands for “Those Who Know”.

In one of John Taylor’s blogs he talks about TWK (tweaks) as ‘those who know.’
The TWKR processor does play on that, too, to some extent. In each case it’s talking about people AMD cares about – tweakers of AMD processors and those that know.

Why does the processor top say 42 on it?

We had to
give the part a model number so we went for 42 (4 cores at 2 GHz) and also it’s
a bit of an homage to ‘Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy’ as it is the answer to
What is the meaning of life, the universal and all things…

How much higher of an overclock should we expect over a Phenom II X4 955?

About
100MHz on air and about 200MHz with extreme cooling…at least that’s what we’ve
seen, but as usual, individual results may vary based on their specific part
and their experience/skill.

So, 100 MHz to 200 MHz faster than a Phenom II 955 overclock… What happened to the rumored 500MHz faster a few weeks back?

As for 500MHz better…I don’t remember anyone claiming that. You guys have the parts so I’d be curious what you accomplish and how that compares to your 955 results.

Some people say that TWKR’s are just early Phenom II X4 965’s? True?

No. And I
have to say a lot of information out there right now on 965 is not correct.

Will this ever go retail and if so what is pricing?

Right now
this is just for the good of the community and not for sale.

How rare are these processors? Are they 1 out of 100 or 1 out of
100,000?

There are
less than 100 of these that I know of, and unlike our competitor we don’t have
the means or process in place to sort through thousands of processors. All AMD
Phenom II processors have great potential and we have a few secrets on what we
look for as the glass comes off the line…so far we’ve found what we’re looking
for. When everything performs well it isn’t too tough to find fast chips.

To start out testing the new TWKR processor we placed it the MSI DKA790GX Platinum motherboard with BIOS version 1.7 to see what it could do. This motherboard has overclocked all of our Phenom II socket AM2 and AM3 processors, so it will give us an idea how much more it can overclock beyond our Phenom II X4 955 processor.

We were able to reach 3.9GHz on the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Processor with the XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 air cooled heat sink.

We were able to reach 4.0GHz on the AMD Phenom II X4 TWKR 42 processor with the XIGMATEK HDT-S1283 air cooled heat sink. This is an improvement of 100MHz on air, but we had to bump the voltage up to 1.46V rather than the 1.45V used to max out the Phenom II 955 processor. Basically, the processor was able to run another 0.1V more CPU Core Voltage which was good enough to reach an extra 100MHz. During our interview with AMD they said a 100MHz overclock was expected on air and that is exactly what we saw.

Let’s take a look at some Liquid Nitrogen (LN2) overclocking and see how that looks.